these might be used in combination with some simple IR or just cameras (need more CPU but could double as optical flow sensors) used to locate becaons for landing or grabbing things

Ideally, both sensors should have an unobstructed front view on pitch dimension, with aditional unobstructed jaw dimension for LIDAR.
Both sensors need to be able to independantly rotate on pitch axis for compensation of the angle of the drone when flying, and for scanning up and down (going in through windows, looking down when landing, etc) maybe rangefinder should also rotate on jaw axis on some fast servos for looking around independant of the drone orientation. not sure yet.

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IR and ultrasound were also options, they are cheap but tricky and unreliable, (ultrasound behaves extra badly due to propeller noise on drones)
These things can be compensated for, but laser rangefinding will always afaik give more accuracy and reliability at a price.

people often ask me why I own a drone, what is it for, and then half of the time they say that I could use it to record weddings and get some cash flowin'

If mention of recording weddings doesn't kill all my will for conversation, I'll say drones are so simple to make these days that I find it hard to justify not owning one.
also, at the time there is no regulation and no one ever counts on you owning a flying robot, so its a sweet spot to own one.
a drone is a flying sidekick, it can, in theory, do whatever a flying sidekick can do. it can enter through windows and steal jewlery with its tiny robot hands. Sounds ridicilous but technically it is not hard to do. In the following years we'll have to rethink space and what can be done, and before that happens, I get to be a kind of a superhero.

today, drones are very primitive. I'll fix some parts that I care about. and if I make anything useful, Im guessing drone related kickstarter projects would be welcome.

a few ideas,

work on being more autonomus, gesture recognition, landing on backpack, automatic charging, simple commands like follow me, land and observe, and such

picking up bread in the morning

ground locomotion, wheels or legs!

stringing a rope somewhere high or for a tyrolean traverse - I can be a very slow batman and I always wanted to string a hammock up between two buildings.

guarding a camp spot and scarring bears away

looking for people

planting and picking up sensors

security? (I'm terrified of security robots working against me, I'm excited about security robots working for me - maybe I won't touch this.)

obvious things like scouting or mapping, it would be nice to have something that creates a google maps or openstreetmap layer as it flyes around, and it shouldn't be too hard to implement, in theory :)

few concrete things to work on, sorted by priority

integrate a real computer (starting with beaglebone in my case, will need to reverse and implement sbus and naza CAN bus protocols)

long range modem - something like xbee xtend and/or sim cards for control over gsm